Alex

Need a new brand identity for your business? I offer logo design, brand naming, brand strategy, creative direction, graphic design, web design and more. modular.studio

@pie6k You’re stuck using the same visual motif of the original logo, which is totally disconnected from the product’s promise. Shame. This spot here obviously isn’t working either. Not exactly what I’m looking for.

🫣

Love this mindset. More agencies and creative need to have it. They get a seat at your table, not the other way around. Protecting the power dynamic is the best thing for you and for them. I’ve refused to join client Slacks for a long time, terrible signal to noise ratio on Slack. Nice for low stakes internal communication but you shouldn’t have (or want) external partners on there with you. What do you use for the project management side of things?

“We don’t adopt your rituals. You adopt ours.” That was the rule at my agency for every client engagement. Most agencies pitch “we become part of your team” like it’s a feature. It’s not. The moment you join their Slack, adopt their tools, follow their meeting cadence, and work inside their systems, you’ve signaled them you’re a vendor. You work for them. You follow their rules. You’re embedded in their world now, and you will assimilate whether you mean to or not. Their bad habits become your bad habits. Their slow approval process becomes your slow approval process. You came in sharp and different—that’s why they hired you—and within two weeks you’re just another set of avatars in their Monday standup. At my agency, we did the opposite. When a client hired us, they got embedded on our team. Our systems. Our communication tools. Our review cadence. Our rituals. Why? Because if they could do this well on their own, they wouldn’t have hired us. They came to us because their way wasn’t working. So why would we go work their way? We shipped more in the first week than most clients’ internal teams shipped in three months. And when they saw that pace, the dynamic flipped. They stopped asking for weekly status meetings. They started deferring to our process because they saw what happened when they let us run. If a client wouldn’t change any of their habits to work with you, you’re replaceable. If a client restructures how they communicate, review work, and make decisions just because that's how you do things, you're undeniable. Do you have a way of working that’s distinct enough that a client would be better off it they adopted it? Not a process page on your website. An actual set of rituals and standards that you would never compromise on. If not, build the rituals. Make them opinionated. Then stop embedding with your clients and start embedding your clients with you.

@jameygannon I was in the same boat, now making an app in Claude after the idea hit me like a bolt of lightning after a particularly challenging project. You just have to be patient and not force it. If you keep exposing yourself to new situations, the idea will come.

i want to make tools like these so bad but i never have any good ideas

this is so sick

Honestly, no big deal. This is good positioning. There’s plenty of businesses out there who see design as a cost to be minimised rather than an investment to be made. They should have a provider that thinks the way they do. We (and our clients) think differently. That design is the competitive advantage and one of the few moats left in business. It’s a battle of ideologies. Let’s see who wins in the end.

"Design is a tax" is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to design something and why it's valuable.

@thisisgrey No, they are going to keep charging in deranged, unpredictable ways entirely detached from the reality of business until Monotype buys every single one of them for pennies on the dollar.

Thought — While browsing a type foundry, I configured a lifetime use of one typeface family, and the cost climbed to £120k. Buying fonts has been stuck for decades in two modes: free and exorbitant prices. Can we please have reasonable prices?

@isolatedrook You’re not ready to accept the ultimate patch to address exploits: Ban PC gaming.

This has to be addressed and soon. Just because you call it 'tech' doesn't change the fact that its an exploit that gives one shell a massive advantage over the others.

The managerial elite trying to eliminate uncertainty and waste. An attempt to domesticate the creative. I used to say design isn’t art! Because I wanted design to be taken more seriously by businesses. But these days I realise a good designer is far more like a good artist than a good businessperson. Design may not be art, but design IS about emotion. And there’s no cell in the spreadsheet for emotion. This fact drives a certain kind of person crazy.

the obsession with optimizing everything for the sake of “conversion” is the single worst thing that has happened to design

@0xCharlota @claudeai I finally had an internal tool / app idea hit me like a bolt of lightning after wrapping up a big website project. I’ve used Claude AI all day today and made a ton of progress already. It really is that easy. If you’re a designer and you have a clear idea, the sky’s the limit.

this is your sign to use @claudeai to vibecode an interactive swatchbook of your favorite colours

I’ve started using Claude AI to vibe code an internal tool for my agency. One thing I’ve noticed is that I speak to Claude much more like a human coworker, writing phrases like “that looks great” and using natural sentence structure. However, when I ask Grok a question, I am annoyed when it tries to behave like a human, and have a “just put the fries in the bag” mentality to its answers. I wonder why that is?

@EndlessGl This game is a taste litmus test.

The game just genuinely oozes The Sauce. If you are falling for the "Concord 3.0" posts, you are truly missing out. I promise you that. You are legitimately holding yourself back from playing a great game.

@DenisJeliazkov Better for a designer to care too much rather than not enough.

Most design systems are ego projects.

@rfkenmore I don’t know if this negatively affects drape but being in a country that gets extremely hot and dry ultralight shirts are a great idea. Very difficult to dress well when it’s 35 °C (95 °F).

Gitman Vintage just put out an "Ultralight" version of their classic Oxford Shirt and it's.... $310 I don't know the internals at that brand, but I struggle to understand what they're doing Product keeps getting more and more expensive, while there has been no meaningful newness or improvement reflected in the assortment

Ironically, I never see more people talking about Figma than on here. Figma is majority UX / UI but design is a big industry. Most of the world is using still Adobe and Canva. That said, UI & UX are the most easily disrupted disciplines in design because they rely so heavily on “best practices”. The advice is half right, you can’t get stuck on Figma and pushing pixels, you need to keep climbing or you’re going to drown in the rising tide.

I agree 100% with Dann. I think the X bubble is filled with senior designers who like to trash Figma and jump on the new shiny thing. We tend to forget that more than 90% of designers and companies still use Figma for their day-to-day work. They're not going to ditch it for a fancy AI tool that's only a couple of months old, even if it's super good. Bottom line: X isn't the entire market. We live in a design bubble. The market is huge, and Figma isn't going anywhere (for now).

@ilyamiskov Actually, it’s vital.

Gatekeeping is not cool man.

@DenisJeliazkov Yeah, but you kill the magic of design if you only let data steer your decisions. As a whole, the design industry needs to be getting looser and more intuitive with the process, not more rigid.

Design reviews are ego trips. "I don't like blue." "What if it was bigger?" "This doesn't feel right." Feedback without metrics is opinion. From now on: No feedback without data. No feedback without context. No feedback without solutions. That's a design review.

@Kenneth Well until we can make middle management illegal we need to stop making surveillance tools like this.

I don’t feel Figma is at fault. A good manager would have pushed back. It’s easy to blame tools but its really the leadership and the org culture that’s the problem here 🚩

People often say this as a point of pride, but what you’re describing are the classic symptoms of brain rot. Listening to things at 2.5x speed should be because you need to get to the point quickly but you don’t know where that point exactly is. Tutorial videos are good example of this. It should not be your default speed of consumption. You are ruining your attention span in the same way prolonged excessive noise ruins your hearing. If you want to cure yourself of this 21st century disease, you need to cut all 2.5x speed content out of your life, delete TikTok, and avoid any content creators who cut and edit just before the end of their sentence. Get well soon.

for the most part, it’s kinda hard for me to listen to ppl talk at 1x speed now in real time when i am used to reading things insanely fast or listening to edited podcasts & youtube videos at like 2.5x or asking an llm to tell me things in the exact vector, rhythm, & format i’d like to consume them in. ironically i have to put in *way more* effort to listen to someone live. like i genuinely practiced & got really good at active listening but damn is it draining as fuck.

@zoink @Riyvir Defaults are a powerful thing. What does it say about your product that the default setting is surveillance mode?

@Riyvir We built “drafts” (which are default private) for a reason. Our goal is to facilitate creative thinking, not hinder it. Ultimately the environment you are in matters more than the tool you use. BTW if you use source control then all your arguments apply to code as well.

@KingWarthog @alecttrona Groundskeeper Chic.

@adgmodular @alecttrona I got a lot of keys bro

Things I don’t like in men’s fashion: - Jorts - Cuffed chinos or joggers - When men clip their keys onto their pants - Layering T-shirts under linen - Nike Dunks - Mustard-coloured anything - Skinny jeans - Sock ties - Desert boots - Orange-toned leather anything

You can’t. Hence why creative agencies and freelancers need to think long and hard about what they actually want and not just listen to other entrepreneurs and this “growth at all costs” mindset that our startup clients often have. Do you want to be a business owner or do you want to be a craftsman? Do you want to be rich, or do you want to do great work? These aren’t entirely either/or but they are two ends of the same spectrum, closer to one takes you further from the other.

We had a client ask us: "How do you plan on scaling without diluting the quality?" And now I can't sleep.